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Background
The genesis for this chapter emerged when we, Linda, Helen and Debbie (authors),
met for the first time at an Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)
Special Interest Group (SIG) workshop. Here Linda shared how she had contem-
plated the philosophical and theoretical notion of ‘cogenerativity’ to describe and
explain how educators and researchers might create the conditions for initial teacher
education (ITE) school-university partnerships to develop and flourish. Linda’s con-
templations of her recent work as program director of a new graduate-entry teacher
education program that involved school-university partnerships resonated with both
Helen and Debbie. Helen recognised parallels with her work that involved co-
teaching triads, and Debbie saw resemblances to her work in developing university,
school and system partnerships that support professional experience. Developing
and sustaining school-university partnerships have become recent additions to the
accreditation and reaccreditation processes for initial teacher education programs in
Australia (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), 2015 ,
2016 ).
In this chapter, we use the methodology of ‘metalogue’ – used previously by
Linda (see Willis & Exley, 2016 ; Willis, Kretschmann, Lewis, & Montes, 2014 ;
Willis & Menzie, 2012 ) – to explore our growing understanding of cogenerativity
and its potential to inform initial teacher education (ITE) school-university partner-
ships. Originally coined by Bateson ( 1972 , 1987), the term, metalogue, is defined as
‘a conversation about some problematic subject [where ideally] the structure of the
conversation as a whole is also relevant to the same subject’ (p. 12). Bateson’s
example of a conversation with his daughter about ‘muddles’ is therefore deliber-
ately muddled in its structure. Likewise, in our case, the structure of our conversa-
tion works to actually cogenerate a shared understanding of the concept of
cogenerativity. Readers should be aware that as the form of the conversation con-
tributes as much as the content to both developing and presenting our understanding
of the concept, it requires a different level of reading in which attention is paid
simultaneously to both the process and product of the dialogue. A metalogue resem-
bles a metanarrative where information, ideas and even emotions that emerge in
conversation fold back into the conversation to enable the participants to reflexively
consider the problem. Calling on Bateson’s ( 1980 ) work, Roth and Tobin ( 2002 )
elaborated that:
Metalogues are conversations that take previous texts or conversations and analyse them at
a new, meta-level. Metalogues therefore are a means to represent analyses that move
through several levels of complexity (or logical order/type as Gregory Bateson called it).
Metalogues ... [enable] previous analyses to become the topic of reflection and/or discus-
sion. That is, metalogues constitute a practice of reflexivity. (p. xxiii)
These conversations not only enable potentially new and different perspectives
about, and solutions to, the problem being considered but also allow the participants
to gain new knowledge and insights about the problem, one another, the world in
general and themselves personally. In this case, we were interested in discussing
L.-D. Willis et al.